Original Watercolor “Rio Grand Canyon Taos” [SOLD]

Everyone in the Santa Fe area knows the name of Santa Fe painter and furniture maker, William Penhallow Henderson and his poet wife Alice Corbin Henderson, but apparently few recognize the name of their daughter Alice as that belonging to a painter.

Alice Oliver Henderson Evans Rossin Colquitt was the daughter of the famous artist couple, but she apparently was not known as an artist. Several knowledgeable are dealers as well as Alice’s secretary who worked for her during her last five years of life were not aware that she produced any paintings.

This watercolor of the Rio Grande Canyon just south of Taos was painted by Alice in 1931, but perhaps she did not continue painting for the remainder of her life, or, if she did, she must have painted very seldom. She lived until 1988.

One of her husbands, John Evans, was the son of Mable Dodge Lujan of Taos. Another of her husbands, Colquitt, was a grand nephew of Mable Dodge Lujan. It was from the estate sale of this last husband that this painting was purchased a decade ago.

As an additional bit of history, the Hendersons lived in Santa Fe in a lovely home built in 1925, next to the studio he had built in 1919 on Camino del Monte Sol. Today, artist Andy Maulding, great-grandson of the Hendersons, lives in the former Henderson studio. Maulding also is a great-grandson of Mable Dodge Luhan and the son of two-time syndicated political cartoonist Bill Mauldin of World War II fame.

Camino del Monte Sol was a street favored by many of Santa Fe’s early artists, including Frank Applegate, Andrew Dasburg, writer Mary Austin, and all five of the Los Cinco Pintores—Fremont Ellis, Willard Nash, Will Shuster, Jozef Bakos, and Walter Mruk.

The painting is in excellent condition. The colors are brilliant and well chosen by the artist. She was an accomplished painter. It is too bad she did not pursue that as a career.